Cock and Bull

Allusive yet elusive, Gary Webb's colourful assemblages both vividly evoke and simultaneously evade their subject matter. Not entirely representational, nor exactly abstract, his work hovers somewhere in between the 'functional and imagined [...], maintaining a form of poetic lightness afforded by suggestions and allusions that are never burdened with the need for weighty explanations.'[1] Cock and Bull (2001) is an excellent case in point, a lyrical precis of a nonsensical phrase that uplifts as much as it confounds.

Chickens spring to mind, but we are not sure why. It might be the sunshine yellow of a flash of beak, taken together with the rooster red of its plinth-like plexiglas. Or perhaps its the untreated timber of a rudimentary coop; combined with visions of scraping and scratching, pecking and clawing, that are inexplicably conjured by the gravel-like coins that gather at its base. Fleeting recollections of poultry laid out on a plate, complete with china dipping bowls to boot; the sculpture operates on a linguistic level similar to Noam Chomsky's famous phrase 'colourless green ideas sleep furiously', in which he demonstrated the possibility of a syntactically complete, semantically ambivalent sentence construction.

It is this playful openness that Alex Farquharson identifies as Webb's sculptures ability to 'seduce, thrill, irritate and amuse... although they monopolise our attention, they also frustrate our attempts to decipher them.'[2] Webb, who was born in 1973, and studied for his BA at Goldsmiths College 1994-7, embraces this ambiguity: 'I like that, I find that quite an intense place to be involved in – when you're trying to avoid the situation where you can say – it looks like this. I love avoiding being caught for any reasons of language.'[3]

It is significant that whilst at Goldsmiths he was taught by artist Michael Craig-Martin, who was senior tutor in the Visual Art department at the time. The influence of Craig-Martin, whose work An Oak Tree (1973) has become a benchmark in the history of British conceptual art, is decipherable in Webb's work. In the same way that Craig-Martin places a glass of water on a high shelf and deems it An Oak Tree, Webb interrogates contemporary notions of language, still-life, and the ready-made through gleeful translation into unconventional materials. His bold use of line and colour also owes a debt to Craig-Martin, whose later works and commissions explore notions of scale and three dimensionality within two dimensional planes.[4]

Webb's practice may also be read within the trajectory of the so called 'New Generation' of sculptors of the 1960s, such as Anthony Caro, William Tucker and Philip King, whose work formulated 'a radically new and different form of sculpture', sitting directly on the floor and using brightly coloured metals and synthetic materials associated with industry and commerce rather than the venerated bronze of yesteryear.[5] The materials used in Webb's works are similarly informed by contemporary settings: in particular the synaesthetic catastrophe of indoor shopping malls. This underlines a pervading anxiety about capital and environmental problems caused by mass production that exists in Webb's work, as he asks: 'where does it all go, where does it all end up, all the chemicals and oils that are used to produce this stuff?'[6]

© Shamita Sharmamcharja, 2010

1. Andrea Tarsia, 'All that is Solid' pp52-62, Early One Morning, (Exh, cat, Whitechapel Gallery: London: 2002) 55

2. Alex Farquharson, 'Gary Webb' pp 37-42, Gary Webb: Mirage of Loose Change (Exh. Cat., Kunsthaus Glanis & Les press du reel: Dijon: 2007), 37

3. Gary Webb, in interview with Iwona Blazwick, Early One Morning, op.cit., 154

4. See http://www.michaelcraigmartin.co.uk/ for further information.

5. Mary Horlock, 'Tra-La-La- British Sculpture in the Sixties', 35-48, Early One Morning, op.cit, 38

6. Webb, in interview with Iwona Blazwick, op. cit, 157